Hacker News Reader

Try Stackexchange search, it never gets you what you are looking for, they are just using some kind of Elastic Search.

I think Google instead indexes SO pages as any html, and does a much better job at figuring out what "unzip .bz2" means.

View on HN

Google ignores special characters though - that makes it really hard to search for some things.

Not always. Since a year or two, I'm seeing they take into account many special characters:

https://www.google.com/search?q=.

https://www.google.com/search?q=.bz2 and https://www.google.com/search?q=bz2 are different, for instance.

I think google flags accounts as programmers and treats their searches differently. If I'm logged out of Google, searching for programming questions sometimes leads to sites on completely unrelated topics. Whereas when I'm logged into my account, from which 99% of my searches are programming intensive, I get all relevant programming results.

Google does this with all areas of interest. Politics, knitting, cat videos, programming etc. Sometimes it is useful sometimes it will re-enforce an echo chamber effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com